“‘Mulatti per davvero’: Cantanti afroamericani alla Scala nel secondo dopoguerra tra razzismo e princìpi di autenticità” (‘“Mulatto For Real”: African American Singers at La Scala in the Postwar Period Between Racism and Principles of Authenticity’). Biblioteca Teatrale 141 (2024): 419-434
In contrast with the international context, Italian musicology has not yet addressed the study of the influence of racial ideas on the country’s musical culture. This article contributes to this field by examining the experience of African American opera artists at La Scala between the 1950s and the 1970s. The essay shows that the perception of racial differences, far from being a secondary factor compared to musical considerations, played a central role in the promotion of performances featuring African American artists. An analysis of the circumstances surrounding the production of these performances reveals that the La Scala administration staged the presence of Black singers on the operatic stage by assigning them roles imagined as exotic or non-European. At the same time, a study of critical and audience reactions to the performances of African American opera singers highlights the persistence of a racial and colonial imagination that developed in Italy from the liberal age onward, to which the artists themselves inadvertently lent cultural legitimacy through their work.
“From Grinder to Nipper: Opera, Music Technology, and Italian American (Self-) Representation,” Cambridge Opera Journal 35 (2023): 146-177 (available in Open Access here)
In this article I argue that the longstanding practice of depicting Italian Americans as opera lovers stems from a tradition associating Italian immigrants with mechanical music devices. As a growing number of Italian unskilled labourers entered the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were stereotyped as street musicians, and especially as organ grinders, in mainstream popular culture. Beginning in the 1900s, recording manufacturers strove to make home phonographs appealing to the middle class by breaking the chain of mechanical, social and racial associations that connected the phonograph with earlier musical devices such as the barrel organ, and with those who played them. Because of the prominent marketing role that record labels assigned to Italian opera, this commercial strategy had important consequences for the genre as well as for Italian immigrants, who leveraged opera’s renewed visibility and audibility into an effective vessel for social and political empowerment.
“Musical Resistance through Strategic Essentialism: The Case of Italian Opera in Early Twentieth-Century U.S.” In Music and Resistance in the 20th Century, edited by Igor Contreras and Helena Martín-Nieva, 209-233. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023
In recent years, ethnomusicologists and popular music scholars have used the concept of strategic essentialism to describe how communities employ music to resist social discrimination. This chapter illustrates its value for historical analysis through the case of Italian opera among Italian immigrants and their descendants in the United States in the early twentieth century. Although most Italian immigrants identified primarily with their region or village of origin, U.S.-born white upper classes and the mainstream press grouped them together and judged them by preexisting notions of Italian identity. In response, Italian American leaders encouraged their communities to strategically embrace prestigious Italian cultural products. Italian opera, aided by the rise of recording technology and the involvement of famous Italian singers, became a focal point for engagement. By attending performances and purchasing records, Italian Americans used opera to assert their place in a multicultural nation while maintaining a connection to their imagined cultural roots across the Atlantic. As overseas immigration declined in the 1920s, opera became an important means of expressing both social integration and transatlantic cultural identity.
“The Phonograph and Transnational Identity: Selling Music Records in Philadelphia’s Little Italy, 1900s-1920s.” In Phonographic Encounters: Mapping Transnational Cultures of Sound, 1890-1945, edited by Elodie A. Roy and Eva Moreda Rodriguez, 222-241. New York: Routledge, 2021
At the start of the twentieth century, owners of neighborhood stores across the U.S. recognized new business opportunities in the commercialization of home phonographs and began adding music records to their merchandise. Because the phonograph originated in U.S. industry, record retailers in immigrant neighborhoods provided different ethnic communities with access to a technology widely perceived as a symbol of American progress. While ethnic record stores benefited from the highly centralized distribution networks of major U.S. phonograph manufacturers such as Victor, Columbia, and Edison, they also operated within broader music networks involving local musicians and international publishers, circulating repertoires tailored to the specific interests of their communities. This article sheds light on the little-studied experience of ethnic music dealers by focusing on record stores in Philadelphia’s Little Italy, one of the largest Italian communities in the U.S., during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources, genealogical records, contemporary Italian-language press, trade journals, and interviews with descendants of storeowners, I argue that first- and second-generation Italian music dealers and their customers used recorded music as a tool to navigate the tensions between their culture of origin and the cultural hierarchy imposed by the U.S. recording industry.
“‘The Destiny of a Whole Race’: Identity, Race, and Politics in the Cold War Italian Performances of Porgy and Bess,” Music & Letters 102, n. 1 (2021): 101-138
In 1954-5, Porgy and Bess appeared for the first time in Italy in an all-Black production formally endorsed by the US State Department. Italian theatre administrators saw this production as an opportunity to sever any ideological connection with Fascism after decades of institutional support. At the same time, while Italian audiences and critics were often aware of the essentializing practices at the origins of Porgy and Bess, they relied on the stereotypical image of African American culture presented by the show to project their own experiences and political aspirations onto the opera’s subject and music. Drawing on primary sources, interviews, and the analysis of the earlier European reception of Porgy and Bess, this article argues that the success of the opera in Italy, rather than being determined by US diplomatic efforts, was a result of Italians’ need to redefine a sense of collective identity in a time of political transition.
“’Noi siamo, si sa, della Scala la banda’: Appunti per una storia sociale del loggione della Scala nel secondo Novecento” [“‘We Are, It is Well Known, the La Scala Posse’: Notes for a Social History of La Scala’s Galleries in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century”]. In Identità di luogo, pluralità di pratiche: Componenti sonore e modalità participative nel contesto urbano milanese, edited by Cecilia Malatesta and Ortensia Giovannini, 21-49. Milan: Mimesis, 2016
This chapter examines the social history of the loggione (upper gallery) at La Scala during the twentieth century, challenging the myth of opera as inherently popular culture. Through archival materials, photographs, newspaper articles and interviews, the study reveals how the loggione‘s supposedly democratic access masked a more complex reality: while ticket prices were relatively low, the uncomfortable conditions, poor sightlines, and cultural knowledge required made the galleries primarily the domain of passionate aficionados rather than working-class audiences. The chapter analyzes how loggionisti developed distinctive social rituals and spatial practices within the galleries, transforming their physical segregation into a strategic position from which to assert cultural authority over opera interpretation. La Scala’s management, meanwhile, instrumentalized the loggione‘s mythology as vox populi to demonstrate the theater’s accessibility to less affluent audiences, particularly important in post-WWII Italy when public institutions needed to justify state funding.
“Alla ricerca di una ‘traccia nella storia’: Renzo Rossellini e le musiche per Vanina Vanini” [“In Search for a ‘Trace in History’: Renzo Rossellini and His Music for Vanina Vanini”]. In Storia Patria tra Letteratura e Cinema, Senso e Vanina Vanini, edited by Andrea Martini and Simona Micali, 175-196. Turin: Kaplan, 2014
In this article, I examine the music that composer Renzo Rossellini wrote for the film Vanina Vanini (1961), directed by his brother Roberto Rossellini. I reconstruct the original dramaturgy of the score by analyzing manuscripts deposited with SIAE, the Italian authors’ society, and comparing them with the film’s released version as well as with evidence about scenes that were cut or altered shortly before the premiere. The study shows how production interventions deeply modified the film’s structure and affected the placement and meaning of recurring musical themes. By tracing unused or reworked musical cues, I propose a partial restoration of the initial narrative conception and highlights the expressive coherence of Renzo Rossellini’s work despite the film’s complicated history.
Siel Agugliaro 